BT pushes up its numbers - bigger profits, faster DSL speeds, no caps

In fact BT has gone on the offensive in the UK market by introducing 'Totally Unlimited Broadband' on all its offerings (except the very cheap ones) and cutting the prices. Crazy times, crazy guys.

Here's the new BT prices and conditions, just to make our US friends jealous and those of you working for either AT&T or Verizon nervous. Keep in mind that this is not some wild-eyed market-building DSL challenger, this is the dominant DSL player. There are usually even cheaper deals available (depending where you are).

Nearly all BT's broadband will now come without "usage limits and free from traffic management", says BT. The 16Mbit/s offer is £16 per month (US$25), ranging up to £26 (US$41) for 76Mbit/s for BT's top of the range Infinity service.

According to some comparison numbers on Benoit Felten's blog US DSL users pay an average US$46 to get an average 6.7Mbit/s and caps are increasingly applied.

But that's not all. BT is also offering an introductory six months free if you sign up now. And the company has announced an online storage service with a free allowance for all consumer broadband customers up to 50GBs.

So a serious market battle and price war - mostly against the rival cable group, Virgin Media - seems to be breaking out.

The important thing here is that this comes at exactly the same time as other big telcos (such as France Telecom) are complaining that the OTT players are flooding their networks. Not much sign of flooding on BT's network which, according to a confident John Petter, managing director of BT's Consumer Division, "can stand up to the extra bandwidth demands from totally unlimited products everywhere across the UK."

The group has also cheered up the London stock market. Profit before tax for the latest quarter was up 7 per cent at £675m and up 8 per cent at £1.861 billion for the nine months.

Earnings per share over both periods were also up.

BT is making great play of its fibre to the curb roll-out (which is enabling it to offer the high speeds). It claims more than 13 million premises now passed with around 100,000 additional premises added each week. It now has 1.25 million homes and businesses on fast broadband and it's gearing up to push into TV and sport across its links later this year.

See our Altertnative Agenda video on peering and Internet costs: Google refuses to pay the piper